Kristin teaching & learning in Korea

Hello Typhoon!

September 2, 2010

Yesterday was just absolute chaos. Typhoon Kompasu (Compass) hit Seoul early in the morning with significantly high winds and light rain. Now it probably doesn’t sound all that bad – I’ve actually seen hurricanes and blizzards with higher winds and more precipitation – but I think that because my area wasn’t all that prepared for the storm, Kompasu was just way too much for the school staff to handle.

I woke up to the sound of glass shattering and garbage can lids smacking into car doors and rushed to the window to see just all kinds of debris …everywhere. No one was really willing to bring their trash in despite the impending tropical storm so the results were predictable: large steaming heaps of ramen and veggies plastered on the sidewalk, foam boards from various packaging floating all over, plastic mush mixed with vomit crusting around trees. *CRINGE* And the way signs are precariously hung from…I don’t even know what just lent itself to the 300 pound equivalent of a loose tooth dangling from a stringy nerve. What was worse, people crowded beneath the signs as they swayed obviously aware of the danger but frozen in terror under them.

In Maryland, this sort of thing probably would have shut down the schools – there would have been broadcasts on the television and radio showing which schools got what delays and so on. My area was in no way prepared for this. I knew this already actually after Seoul was hit with the biggest snow storm in decades last winter and they were moving the snow with tractors (there were no delays btw) So I managed my way into school only to hear that it was delayed 2 hours from students who arrived before me and then I went to the teachers and heard it’d be delayed only 30 minutes (what?) How were students being notified? Parents called like crazy to hear the news that even other teachers weren’t privy to.

Anyway, the delay turned out to be 2 hours and 20 minutes for reasons I’ll never really understand.